Demographic history and population structure of northern Scandinavia – the Northern Atlas Project
Europe is farily well described in its genetics. A large amount of the areas and populations west of the Urals are well characterised and easy to find data from. And now also from different chronological stratas. This is, however, not true for northern Sweden. Little has been done on modern populations, and even less on ancient material. There are reasons for this, the area has its own ethical problems, and the preservational status is also of the kind so little organic material remains from prehistoric and early historic strata. Nevertheless, there is medieval material from the southern part of northern Scandinavia, and in some cases material from even earlier stratas. We are presently working on this material to expand our demographic understanding of northern Europé as far north as possibvle. The project in financed by The Swedish Research Council, it oficially runs throughout 2016, and the active researchers are Anders Götherström, Linus Girdland Flink, Maja Krzewinska, Torun Zachrisson, Jan Storå, and Nihan Dilsad Dagtas.
The Atlas of ancient human genomes in Sweden – the Atlas Project
The demographic history of Europeans has been a debated topic for centuries. Archaeology has established a chronological and geographical picture of the cultural and social development but the actual demographic development is still unknown. But with the revolution in high-throughput sequencing,ancient DNA becomes useful in detecting and dating demographic events in the history of populations. Evidence of migrations and other types of demographic events may indeed be preserved in ancient human bones and with a sufficient set of ancient human genomes, providing good representation of all chronological periods, our understanding of the demographic development would be very different. We will sample a large number of individuals excavated in present-day Sweden dating from the Mesolithic Stone Age to the late Iron Age/Early Medieval period. Out of these samples, some will be selected for deep-sequence analyses to a 10xcoverage. The program adopts a multidisciplinary approach by combining tools from Molecular and Population Genetics, Archaeology, Bioarchaeology, and Computational Biology in order to bridge the gap between Natural science and Humanities. The multidisciplinary approach is instrumental for selecting and investigating samples, and the execution of the specific research projects on demography during prehistory. The program is financed from The Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences and The Swedish Research Council. The following researchers are active within the ATLAS-program in Stockolm: Anders Götherström, Jan Storå, Torun Zachrisson, Anna Kjellström, Maja Krzewinska, and Natalya Kashuba. He program runs till 2021.
1000 ancient human genomes – the 1K project
Within this program we will extract DNA from archaeological skeletal remains and sequence the complete genomes from a large number of Euroasian prehistoric individuals. These data will then be analysed using statistical and population genetics methods. The new information is expected to provide entirely new insights about how mobility, migration and connections affected our prehistoric ancestors. Bioarchaeological analyses will be an important part of the
project and stable isotopes will help the researchers understand the different individuals’ life history, mobility and diet. Archaeological data and interpretations of cultural patterns, ways of life and artefacts as well as paleoclimate data combined with genetic data will provide a new and unique opportunity to cast light on human prehistory in Eurasia. The program is financed by the Knut & Allice Wallenberg Foundation, it will run from 2017-2021, and the following researchers are presently enlisted to participate in the Stockholm-based part of the program: Anders Götherström, Jan Storå, Maja Krzewinska, Ricardo Rodriguez, and Torun Zachrisson.
Ancient DNA Research 